Aural Aggravation

Earth Island Books – July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Ordinarily, any book reviews published here on Aural Aggravation are music-related – although admittedly, the inclusion of Stewart Home’s most recent outing, Art School Orgy made it here by virtue of being punk in ethos and published by a record label instead of a conventional publisher. It doesn’t pay to be too prescriptive. And so it is with Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots, the collection of poetry by Andrea Janov, which follows Mix Tapes and Photo Albums, described as ‘a coming-of-age poetry collection about a small town punk rock scene’.

Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots is pitched as a book which ‘captures that liminal part of our lives, that time past adolescence, yet before adulthood.’ It’s not really a book about music. In fact, it’s not remotely a book about music. It’s a book about New York, and a book about finding yourself while being lost in a lifestyle. Yet at the same time, music is there, in the background.

Although the visual formatting and typography (set in a very small font – presumably to maintain the shape of the lines and verses on the pages rather than for cost in this instance) is poetical, the pieces themselves are simple, straightforward prose narrative, and the 24 pieces which make up ‘A Fifth Floor Walk-In’ provide a neat linear scene-setting, sketching succinctly sights and sounds, people and places. The brush strokes are broad, with just the most cursory of details fleshing things out. The titles in this first section are all locations (if ‘7B’ feels rather tenuous compared to ‘10th Street and Avenue B’, we learn later that it’s a bar that plays punk rock), and this theme is continued, albeit less strictly, throughout the book. You couldn’t call it psychogeography, but it does serve to pin each reflection to a place, and sometimes a time, too, and in doing to explores the nature of memory and how places become evocative of moments in time, however fleeting, which reverberate in our recollections further down the line.

Amidst the array of sights, sounds, smells, and the general ambience of chatter and bustling subways, the weather is a prominent and recurring feature of these poems. While we British have a global reputation for our obsession with the weather, it equally seems to be an American thing, particularly when it comes to New York: Ed McBain’s novels always place great emphasis on the heat or the cold or the rain, a s from these readings it does seem as if NY has its own quite specific climate conditions which are an integral part of the experience of life in the city. In these early pieces, she captures the contradictory sense of community – or perhaps scene – and isolation, the distance that comes from living in such densely-packed proximity where people avoid eye contact and rarely even meet their neighbours, let alone reach speaking terms (‘NY, NY’).

As the book progresses, so the pace quickens and the details become less sharply defined, as long shifts in clubs and after-shift drinks melt onto an overall sensation of perpetual movement rather than specifics, and if the backdrop references to punk rock and the Beats on the surface feel somewhat cliché, given that Janov is recounting life in her early 20s finding herself in New York, it’s wholly credible, because it’s simply how it goes: these are the gateways to all things ‘alternative’, a rite of passage, almost. While few here in England use the term ‘punk rock’, its broad meaning in American parlance means it has a universal understanding of music that exists outside of the mainstream. Only a handful of bands are mentioned by name, and if anything, this vagueness imbues the writing with a greater relatability because it ‘despecifies’ and thus broadens the scope for understanding that general musical backdrop.

There are darker moments which remind us of the reason for the book’s subtitle, as in ‘Twenty First and Sixth Avenue, Please’ (the formatting I’m unable to replicate here)

Wake up / Suffocated by the sun / Disoriented and groggy / Chin throbbing / Hand caked in blood

[…]

Stand up. / One shoe on. / Sock in my pocket. / Grope around for other injuries. / No other spot of pain. / No cuts or bruises or contusions. / The chin probably needs stitches. / A skull and crossbones bandage will have to do.

There’s nothing dewy-eyed – and perhaps more significantly and more appealing, nothing dramatic about her narrations of living a life without fear simply because being young and immersed in living life, the risks of walking home through parks at 3am blurry with booze simply weren’t a factor for consideration.

There are a number of scenes and recollections which are replayed in only subtly different ways throughout the collection, but the repetition, rather than being frustrating, recreates the experience of lived memory, how things echo back at us variously, how our minds will return to certain times, certain places.

There’s a melancholy intermingled with fond nostalgia in ‘The East Village’, where on returning she reflects on the process of gentrification: the way the few places which remain have changed.

The sequencing of the poems does have a clear overarching linearity: first, the buzz of arriving and discovering New York, followed by the relentless whirlwind of life, before winding down to a more reflective place on revisiting and remembering. It makes for a short but satisfying work.

(Click on image for link to purchase)